Summary

Pretty much just what it sounds like, LanguageTube.org is a place to learn languages with YouTube videos.

Currently, videos are available for the Chinese, French, German, Korean, Russian and Thai languages.

The site has not been updated for a while, but let's hope a little web traffic will re-fuel the motivation to bring together language videos from all over YouTube. It is a great idea, and currently the site it totally ad-free.

Visit LanguageTube.org

Surfing about this morning and came across a helpful list of free online language courses on About.com. The first page covers Arabic, Armenian, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Italian and Japanese. Page 2 of the list continues with Korean, Latin, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

I was very happy to note that lots of the resources on this list are not yet on Free Language! You better believe they will be soon...

While surfing about today I can across a small but very useful list of resources for learning foreign language online for free.

Of special note (and these will be added to the Free Language main page soon) are MIT OpenCourseWare for Foreign Language and Literature and Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Intiative (French).

Got an email the other day from the person that runs the Save Tanii Website. Tanii is an endangered minority ethnic language of the Apatani people of the Ziro plateau in the Lower Subsansiri district in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh.

Here is an excerpt from the Save Tanii website:

During the last 50 years, tremendous change in culture, custom and tradition has taken place on Ziro plateau. Today the last serious point of modernization is that the young Tanii (Apatani) generation is not anymore able to understand its own tradition, nor the terms or words quoted in our heritage language. Let us save Tanii culture, let us teach and learn Tanii language.

It is, indeed, a sad thing to lose a language. I wish the best to this project and hope that it succeeds in bringing some attention to the language and culture of the Apatani people.

Just got an email from a guy over at FooSchool.com who brought my attention to a site in development that will offer free videos for learning English and French (and presumably more eventually).

Currently, only the videos for learning the French language are available, with English coming soon.

The French videos I have checked out are organized by Parisian Arrondissement , which is pretty cool.

I would suggest checking them out and subscribing to their video lessons feeds for both languages so you can know right away when new content is added to the site:

FooSchool.com Learn English Video Lesson Feed
FooSchool.com Learn French Video Lesson Feed

The site still needs some development as the Contact and About pages are currently not up, but this is a true "first look" at the site in progress. If they keep up the quality and pace of content publishing, they'll certainly end up being an excellend multi-media language-learning resource.

Check out FooSchool.com

From Website

About FooSchool

FooSchool was launched in November 2007 with the aim of providing multi-media language lessons in a range of subjects -- for free!

We launched with a very basic design and 40 high-quality French video lessons, each of three minutes duration.

We intend to improve the design and add to the number of lessons in the near future.
FooSchool is Free?! What's the Catch?

There's no catch. FooSchool is free for three reasons:

1. We passionately believe in free education for everyone. We believe that the right to learn is a fundamental human right -- regardless of age, gender or location on the planet.

For an adult living in a developed country, learning a language may help keep the brain healthy. For someone in a developing country, it may help avoid poverty.

2. With the IT/internet revolution, the technology costs of creating and distributing multimedia lessons are no longer exorbitant. Thus, we don't have technology costs to pass on to you.

3. Our main costs are in devising and producing the lessons, as well as maintaining the website. So, while the lessons on this website will always be free, we intend to eventually make a profit through ancillary revenues (e.g. advertising).

ChinesePod is a long-standing podcast with thousands of episodes for learning Mandarin free.

UPDATED (June 23, 2008):

People have emailed me to say that the torrent is down. However, the nature of torrents is that they don't go down easy once they're out there! (http://www.stealthisfilm.com)

At the link below you will find (currently at least) download for all levels of ChinesePod. It's not the 3.1 gigger, there are several options, but it seems to be all there. And legal.

http://www.mininova.org/search/?search=chinesepod

ORIGINAL POST:

I came across the Praxis language post about a torrent for 500 free Mandarin Chinese lessons while reading an interesting article on wayofthegeek.org about using Linux as a language tool. Random how these things occur.

At any rate, this is a hefty 3.1 GB download, so it'll take a while to get all the lessons downloaded. But once you have them in your possession, there is nothing that can stop you from finally learning (or improving your) Mandarin Chinese! (Except perhaps work, studies, significant others, movies, magazines, pets, in-laws...)

At any rate, this is a great download and all you need to know about "torrents" and BitTorrent you can find out in the links below:

Wikipedia Article on BitTorrent
Comparison Chart of BitTorrent Clients
The Official BitTorrent Website
Azureus: A Reliable BitTorrent Client for Linux, Mac and Windows

Just make sure you have the free disk space before you start commanding those 0s and 1s. Best of luck!